The title Mon Amour Sesher Kobita Revisited is in French, Bengali and English. The language is Bengali but the derived culture it presents is global. It is a relocation and contemporisation of Tagore’s Shesher Kobita (1928) a love story between Amit and Lavanya that, atypical of the stereotype, did not end in marriage. Lavanya married Shovanlal.
Shubrojit Mitra directs the film and has developed the script based on a concept by Kaberi Chatterjee, weaving it out as an introspective journey into what might happen if Amit and Lavanya were to meet in Kolkata in 2008.
Amit is Rajarshi (Saheb Chatterjee) here. Lavanya has two identities. One is the flesh-and-blood Brishti (Rituparna Sengupta), housewife and mother and the other is Tilottama who wanders about in Rajarshi’s dreams and pervasive flights of fancy. The dreams, nightmares and flights of fancy are shot in black-and-white while reality, both in the past and the present, is in colour. Shovanlal is Jeet (Tota Roy Choudhury) who is married to Brishti. Rajarshi invites them to his rented apartment in the city to catch up on old times over drinks. Their apparently cheerful camaraderie is punctuated with soulful looks exchanged between the one-time lovers. But as the drinks become one too many, the two men get drunk, Brishti continues to sulk and soon after, the conversation turns into fireworks, attacks and counter-attacks, only to end in an unending flow of tears till Rajarshi realises that the past is best left alone and that the present and the future (suggested through Rai, Lavanya’s little girl) are more important.
Technical Expertise
The first-half of the film is abstract, enriched by a dream-like texture that wanders along with Rajarshi in his world of dreams and nightmares filled with his dream-lover Tilottama. Music is the central character here, immersed in Tagore’s music, with and without songs, mainly used in the soundtrack, and complimented with the poetry of Keats, Donne and Jibananda Das. The second-half is rooted in the real, shot in the claustrophobic ambience of Rajarshi’s drawing room with a huge Rembrandt painting looking down on the three adults and their strange exchanges. The music is still there, but it has retreated to place the characters centre-stage where they generously fall back on an unceasing supply of tears. The hopes raised in the first half of the film collapse in the second as a promising film boils down to a rude climax. The logic, the explanations and the apologies are quite uncalled for given the idealistic, poetic beginning.
27-year old Shubrojit Mitra’s passion for Tagore’s multi-layered creations - fiction, poetry, songs and music–is a pleasant surprise in a day when his peers are deep into pop, Blues, Heavy Metal and such stuff, a world where Tagore is a remote existence. He pours all his love for Bach, for Rembrandt, for the poetry of John Donne, John Keats and Jibananda Das into the film through Rajarshi, an internationally- celebrated filmmaker who lives and works in London. He has come to India to scout for his new film Mon Amour, based on Tagore’s Shesher Kobita. Rajarshi is a genius who sings beautifully, recites poetry from memory, plays the piano, makes films and sometimes, makes love. His dialogue is heavily peppered with intellectual anecdotes ironically dotted with the word ‘flesh’ as a synonym for woman. He refers to his lady-love’s academic competence and intelligence with amusing disdain. Despite his global background and his filmmaking experience, he does not seem to harbour any particularly good opinion about the female of the species. Rakesh Kumar’s cinematography is rich and fluid but it is largely wasted in the second half.
Verdict
Mon Amour Shesher Kobita Revisited therefore, is a good film that loses` its way in the young director’s over enthusiasm to use his first film to showcase his intellectual and aesthetic competence. All that is fine but the screenplay gets a bad beating and all attempts by the three actors fail to rescue the script from falling flat in the end.
Fidelity to the original text is no problem at all. The film proves that without a powerful and tight-knit script, even the best of actors, singers, music and technical excellence can do nothing to save it. One star for the music and the songs and one star for the brilliant cinematography.
